by Lina Rather
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I.: Orate Fratres
WHILE THE SISTERS OF THE Our Lady of Impossible Constellations argued themselves in circles, the Reverend Mother sat silently in her chair at the head of the chapel as she always did, listening to the arguments twist and double back on themselves.
Sister Lucia argued that the ship, being a beast and therefore not in possession of a rational soul, did not have a responsibility to follow the dictates of their order. Sister Varvara countered that convents were sacred places. The ship, be it beast or plant or mineral, had been consecrated according to doctrine. Allowing it to continue on its present course was a clear desecration and would be a blemish on all their souls. Sister Varvara had a face like the surface of an uninhabited moon, gray and stern. Usually, that face of hers brooked no argument.
They were burning too many precious chemlights on this debate. While Sister Ewostatewos delivered a long soliloquy on the early Church’s treatment of barnyard animals and how that might possibly illuminate their current dilemma regarding the ship, the Reverend Mother looked up to the spot where the crucifix hung. Every shipbound convent and poor colony ministry had the same one, mass-produced on Old Earth and brought by the crateful by newly ordained priests doing their hardship posts out here in the black. The Reverend Mother hung this one on the wall herself forty years ago, right after the end of the war, when she was a young woman and the ship was newly consecrated. They’d both been so young then. After she had affixed the crucifix to the ship’s inner membrane with a dab of bioglue under each of the nails, she had laid her head against the muculent wall and listened to the heartbeat pumping fluid across the ship’s undulating body.
It had been a long time since Old Earth sent shipfuls of young priests out into the dark with identical crucifixes to convert the prodigal colonies. The Reverend Mother’s crucifix was a relic of a different age, an age of order and conformity.
“Mother,” Sister Gemma said, drawing her back from her reverie. “I’m afraid we’re no closer to a consensus.”
The Reverend Mother shook her head at her crucifix. She and the small Lord, they shared an understanding. She raised her hands.
Sister Lucia came forward and knelt by her side to watch her hands move. Most of them understood some signing, but she was the best at it.
“We shall think upon this matter for three days,” Sister Lucia translated. “And reconvene.”
“What about our bishop?” Sister Mary Catherine asked. She was stout and squat and the only one of the sisters to be Earth-born, and secretly in their sinful hearts the others believed this had warped her to be too reliant on hierarchical authority. They ignored her. Any communication with Earth would take three weeks to arrive from these outer reaches and another three weeks for the bishop to convey his opinion back. By that time, their decision would have been made one way or the other.
Thankfully, only Sister Lucia knew her well enough to see the small catches in her signing. Irritation, tiredness. Sister Mary Catherine was a new aspirant, directed to their convent because she wanted to minister to the godless outer systems. Apparently no one on Earth had told her that the farther systems had plenty of gods, or that the sisters of the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations spent more time tending wounds of the flesh than bringing heathens to Christ and preferred it that way. She likely was not long for their company.
“The Reverend Mother says she shall send a message to the Vatican tonight.”
And she would, even though there was much to be done. They had been called to a new colony in need of marriages and a baptism, and they would make landfall on that moon in just a few hours. They had been indulging themselves too long in this. “Until then, let us prepare ourselves for the approach to Phoyongsa III. We shall fast from the next bell until landfall.”
Sister Mary Catherine opened her mouth again, but Sister Faustina cut her off so smoothly it seemed like an accident. “As you say, Mother.”
The Reverend Mother clapped her hands together, and the quorum was dispersed. There was work to be done. Always work, even on a pulmonate-ship like this that didn’t require oiling or welding or spare parts. Sister Mary Catherine and Sister Ewostatewos were on plant duty, so that they could all continue to eat. Sister Gemma’s duty was caring for the ship itself as it bore them through the stars. Most of the others went to rest or meditation. And Sister Faustina would monitor the communication array. The Lord worked in mysterious ways and strange places, here in the eternal dark. A call could come at any time and so someone always kept vigil.
The Reverend Mother was left alone in the chapel. She stretched out her hands and tried to stop them shaking. She was old but the tremble in her hands belonged to someone older still. She’d managed to cover it so far.
As she left, she laid her hand on the hatch between this room and the control bay. Beneath this stretch of damp skin ran one of the ship’s two main blood vessels and she could feel the pressure of the hemolymph pumping from the heart, through the invertebrate musculature, past digestive tubules and branching nerve clusters, forward to the head. She offered up a quick prayer for the heart, that it may continue to pump and sustain them all.
* * *
Sister Gemma went to her laboratory. She had set a diagnostic panel up to run through the quorum, and the results would be in by now. She wanted a solution, though she knew there was no clean one.
Before she could check the results, the ship needed tending.
She mixed a hormone injection by dropper and tested it by rubbing a droplet on a patch of ship-flesh she had cultured in a petri dish. The flesh flushed a healthy celadon. The ship was good at taking care of itself, but ten human lives still strained it. The injections sped along waste processing and absorption of excess protein and methane. She prepared a syringe and tapped it to release the air bubbles inside. To her knowledge no one had ever discovered what happened when a living ship had an embolism; she did not intend on being the one to find out.
Before she took vows, Sister Gemma had grown up on a shipyard in orbit around Saturn. Her first job, at fourteen and a half, was coaxing juvenile ships from their larval stage—where they looked like any Elysia chlorotica clinging to any coast on Old Earth—to the stage where they could be introduced to the vacuum. In shipyards, captive ships were bred by hand by biologists. Each individual’s genome was sequenced and mates chosen according to size estimates and risk of genetic disease. Shipwrights waited by the grand mating-ships until they released gelatinous ribbons of eggs like knobbly seaweed. The eggs were too fragile to stay in the airless dark, and so the shipwrights attached them to lattices in climate-controlled bays and culled the eggs down as they grew. A batch of thousands of eggs might produce only five or six viable ships, and only one or two of those would be sizable enough to house more than a dozen crew. It was a process about as far from God as it was possible to be. But there in that bay, spreading nutrient-slush across the lattices, Sister Gemma had her first glimpse of the divine in the slugs’ splitting cells and symbiotic photosynthesis.
&n
bsp; Now she used a scalpel to cut through the mucus membrane that protected the ship’s inner flesh from irritants. She touched the tip of the needle to the pulsing viridian muscle and it quivered under her touch. A ship’s muscle tissue was soft and translucent, just strong enough to stand up to the pressures of space.
Behind her, the hatch made a soft sucking noise. Sister Ewostatewos pulled herself through, carrying a basket. She riffled through the cabinets of chemical additives, searching for something.
“What’s wrong?” Sister Gemma asked.
“A slight iron deficiency in the beds. Nothing unexpected. We haven’t taken on unfiltered water recently.” Sister Ewostatewos poured a packet of soil supplement into a vial of a clear liquid and shook it. This she’d attach to the hydroponics bay’s feeder line and let it flow into the soybeans and carrots they’d planted last week. “You’re hesitating.”
Sister Gemma let the syringe drop and pressed her gloved hand against the naked muscle to keep the membrane from knitting itself back together. “Yes.”
Sister Ewostatewos was the newest of them, besides Sister Mary Catherine, who barely counted since they all knew they weren’t keeping her. She’d grown up on an airless moon, in a bubble. Her father was an Ethiopian Orthodox and her mother a Catholic, which she intimated was a strange partnership. Lately, Sister Gemma had wanted to ask her how she had come to pick one over the other, but some things were too private to ask after. Or too difficult to explain.
“I’m worried it’s my fault,” she said.
“The ship preparing for mating?”
“Yes.” Sister Gemma swallowed. The muscle twitched under her hand: small electrical impulses spasming in the nerves to remind her where she was. “I am responsible for its care. It’s so young for mating. Most ships don’t mature for another twenty or thirty years. Perhaps I wasn’t regulating its hormones correctly. Or I missed a vitamin deficiency.”
“Is that possible?”
Sister Gemma shrugged. Many things were possible. Almost anything. They lived at the very outer bounds of what was known. Back on Old Earth people studied living ships in laboratories and moon-based testing facilities with limitless budgets for breeding programs and genetic studies. They raised generation after generation of ships under endless variables. And even there, no one could be sure what caused one neonate to develop into a viable ship and another to mature to be chamberless and unusable. When she first noticed the ship’s changing hormonal profile, and its odd behavior, she had thought it was the early signs of organ failure. Then she discovered that the ship had imprinted on a mate somewhere in their voyage and was trying to follow its pheromone trail to fulfill their biological imperative. This was a relief for the two seconds before she began to think about the theological implications. “I sent a message to two of the leading research shipyards. But a response won’t arrive in time.”
“If you did the best you could, then everything else was up to God.”
Sister Ewostatewos only said such things when they were true, which made her one of Sister Gemma’s favorite people. In this life there were many people whose mouths were full of empty platitudes.
“I’m afraid,” Sister Gemma confessed. Of more than the ship, though she couldn’t say that.
“There will always be difficult choices. And even if we are the first religious house to face this dilemma, we won’t be the last. More and more orders are taking to living ships every year. Perhaps we will be remembered in teachings for it. How many of us will be remembered at all?”
“How prideful of you.”
Sister Ewostatewos laughed at the joke it was. “We’re all only human. Cheer up, sister. None of us can change what was.”
“You’re right of course.” Sister Gemma pulled her hand away from the ship’s muscle and pressed the syringe smoothly into it. The muscle twitched and then relaxed and she depressed the plunger. The edges of the membrane had gone dry and tacky because of her dallying. She rubbed a dab of moisturizing gel over them. The ship didn’t even need her to press them together—as soon as the gel had absorbed the incision disappeared seamlessly. She would never, never cease to be amazed by these ships. Even if she left shiplife forever one day, she would never forget the feel of its heartbeat surrounding her.
“I didn’t hear your vote earlier. May I ask?”
“I haven’t come to a decision. I don’t believe the ship has a soul, or a holy obligation. If we owned a cow, we would allow it to reproduce. And yet, we don’t live inside a cow. Livestock is not consecrated.” Sister Gemma shook her head. “Every argument I think of, I can counter.”
“Maybe you’ll come to an answer when we turn the gravity off. I find it clears my head.”
“Perhaps.”
Sister Ewostatewos smiled at her and took her mineral supplements back through the hatch. When she was gone, Sister Gemma touched the spot she had just sliced open, now as smooth as a newborn calf’s wet skin. She didn’t believe the ship had a soul. But she did believe it could want. Maybe if she stayed here, listening, she would hear its voice. Maybe it would tell her what to do.
* * *
Sister Faustina made herself a cup of tea with plenty of cream and sugar. This was not, perhaps, in keeping with the spirit of the upcoming fast, but she would drink it down before the next bell. They weren’t Poor Clares, after all, set on depriving themselves of every earthly comfort. No sense in depriving yourself now when there was plenty of deprivation yet to come. When the water boiled she picked a packet of green tea from the drawer and stirred it until the powder dissolved. She had heard that tea—real tea—was a kind of plant leaf, but she had never seen such a thing. It sounded just like the kind of resource-intensive wastefulness that Old Earthers were fond of. She allowed herself two scoops each from the cream and sugar canisters and let them turn her tea a pale brown like parcel paper.
She screwed the top onto her cup and settled herself into her chair in front of the communications array. Whoever had first grown this ship had been a lot taller, and the chair was never quite comfortable, no matter how many times she asked Sister Gemma to please readjust it. Ships always kept an imprint of their original design, and this one refused to grow a headrest three inches lower on the lump of fat that was her chair.
She set her cup to the left of the screen and rubbed her thumb over the soft moss covering the console until it grew up the sides of the cup to hold it in place. First she had to review the petitioning colony’s data. It was rare, but some convents were lured to their deaths with fake prayer requests. Ships were valuable, as were all their other supplies. The farther you got from Earth, the harder it was to find chemlights or processed chromium or medicine made by someone with a university degree.
Sister Faustina opened the colony’s message. First—a burst of advertisements. Best food in the third system! Repair your vessel at Vishni and Sons—we specialize in liveship propulsion repair! Come settle our beautiful moon—you’ve never seen water as clear as this! All sorts of signals piggybacked off of legitimate communications. Below the advertisements, older signals rolled over each other in the background audio. Some even prewar. Propagandist broadcasts and audiodramas, most read by Mrs. August, the never-named voice of Earth Central Governance. She’d done years and years of broadcasts, all in that particular, beautiful voice of hers. Even after the war, when she’d very likely died in one of the bombings, outer-system children had grown up listening to her bedtime stories, because it didn’t cost coin for the download rights.
Sister Faustina made a note to update their spam filter next time they docked at a station with a half-decent programmer.
The colony had sent a video, which was really an unwarranted expense, but did make it easier to verify their identities. Five people crowded into the screen.
“We send our greetings to the sisters of the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations,” the woman in the center said. She spoke Earth English carefully. Her accent was familiar—Sister Faustina had also grown up speakin
g the patois of the asteroids and shipwreck belts. She knew exactly where this woman was from, with her tightly coiled dark hair and thin eyes and soft sienna skin. And from the real tell—her inherited heterochromia. The Plutonian Archipelago. A junkyard of ships left to wreck at the very edge of the first system. The Archipelago had been settled by two families, one Nigerian and one Tibetan, who built a salvage empire in a worthless trash heap. The Phuntsok family was legendary. For generations they had been the kings of scavenge. Most of them had also been killed in the war when they stood against Earth. As far as Sister Faustina knew, the Archipelago was just a shimmering band of debris around the cold planetoid’s gravity well now. This young woman was probably the second generation to grow up outside it. “We are establishing a new colony on the moon Phoyongsa III. We would like our moon blessed, and three couples would like to be married. And—” She smiled. The darker-skinned man beside her had to be her husband, the way he beamed. “—we will have a baby to be baptized by then. We are sending the coordinates of our moon. We have supplies to trade as well. We eagerly await your reply.”
Sister Faustina checked their colony register and inventory list and found all in order. A baptism was always fun. There would be alcohol of some sort to go around—barley wine, probably—and the baby would be passed hand to hand, there would be real fire and soil-grown food.
There was another message in the bank, also directed specifically to them. How unusual. It had come a long, long way. Based on its signature and the trail of satellites and ships and breaches it had traveled through, it was from the first system.
Sister Faustina sipped her tea. A message from the first system was either very good or very bad. For the forty years since the Great War, Old Earth had retreated inward and left the other three systems mostly to their own affairs. Lately, the gray lady seemed to be stirring. Sister Faustina had seen more and more traders sponsored by Earth Central Governance taking the jumps to the second, third, and fourth systems, bringing with them tantalizing things that only Earth could produce, like silk and real black pepper and prewar wine and that wet-leaf tea they deified. It looked to Sister Faustina an awful lot like they wanted to bring their children back under their iron fist.